Seeing through Shadows: The Black Female Gaze in the Uncanny Worlds of Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi is a British novelist and short fiction writer. She is an immigrant from Nigeria. Her fiction explores colonial themes, Gothicism and duality. The main characters in Oyeyemi’s writings are primarily young and teenage girls. These characters are set in the backdrop of diaspora, where they face the complications of diversity. Helen Oyeyemi's work often engages with the concept of the "Black female gaze" in unique and unsettling ways, particularly within the framework of horror, folklore and magical realism. While not explicitly focusing on traditional horror tropes, Oyeyemi's novels explore the uncanny, the haunted and the dislocated sense of identity, often through the lens of Black female protagonists. Her narratives confront themes of race, gender and power in ways that subvert mainstream horror conventions, emphasizing psychological depth and cultural history. For the present work the novels namely White is for Witching and Mr. Fox are chosen to study the colonial gaze, female gaze and black gaze.